Remnant Population

CHAPTER SIX

Loneliness weighed on Ofelia like stones. She struggled through each day, forcing herself to work in the gardens, forcing herself to check on the animals. Too many times she came back to herself and found that she’d stopped what she was doing to stand gape-mouthed, rigid, listening for sounds she knew she could not hear.

She didn’t understand it. It hadn’t been like this when the others left, her own son and daughter-in-law, people she had known most of her life. Then she had felt free. Then the empty streets and the quiet houses had given her chances she had never had before. Then no voices had been welcome, and over the days even the memory of them had fallen away, leaving her mind at peace. Now she felt trapped, confined in a narrower place than she remembered. The empty streets might be full of enemies; the quiet houses gave hiding place to her fears. She could not forget the strange voices, voices of people she had never seen, crying out for help, crying out in fear and pain. And death. She had not cried long when Humberto died, or the children. She had not cried at the thought of her own death; death was death, and it came to all, and there was no help for it. But now she cried, feeling the wobbling of her face, the wet tears, the runny nose, the spittle that ran down her chin — the ungraceful tears of the old — for people she had never seen, and had not wanted to see. They had come so far to die, and she had not wanted them.

It made no sense. When the tears finally ran out, she wiped her face with a rag — it had been a scrap of fabric from the center, carried home without noticing — and peered into the street. Nothing. Yesterday and the day before and the day before that, nothing, and nothing would be there tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. She lived in the center of nothing, in a moment always suspended between the eternity behind and the eternity before. It had never bothered her, and now it did. Slowly, as slowly as the retreat of pain from a serious injury, the loneliness wore itself out. The fear remained. Something had killed all those people, and would kill her if it found her. She had been ready enough to die alone on this world, when she chose to stay. But she had believed age would kill her, or accident. Not malice.

She felt fragile, exposed, helpless. There were a few weapons in the storehouses, but she knew they would not save her. No one could be alert all the time; she was human, she had to eat and sleep and use the toilet. One person alone, even with the help of all the machines, was not a human presence. If those things found her, they could kill her easily. She had no doubt they would, as quickly as they had killed dozens of people younger and stronger.

But the fear wore itself out too, more slowly than loneliness. Days at a time she managed to forget — not trying, but simply immersed in the irregular routines of her life. They had not found her yet. They had not killed her yet. And she still enjoyed things, and still wanted things.

She retrieved the beads she had dropped from under the sewing tables, and strung them again. She made and painted more beads, added the slimerod cores she had dried, the seed pods of this plant, tufts of long hair from cows’ tails caught in brush… she wasn’t sure what she was making, only that she liked the patterns of chunky things and thin ones, color and texture and line. When she put the construction on her body, she realized it needed a bit more here — another length of beads — and something else there to balance the weight and keep it from slipping off her shoulders. She looked in the mirror. Odd how seldom she’d done that, not since before the other landing. She had not wanted to see her expression; she had been afraid that she might frighten herself. But now the figure in the mirror hardly looked human. She stared. She felt the same — mostly the same — and in the mirror her own face scowled at her, the familiar scowl with which she had always greeted her mirror-self. Her eyebrows were thinner and whiter; her white hair a tousled bush of silver. But the inner self that had been so intent on stringing beads and feathers and wool and cows’ hair and seedpods, that had been so sure where to lace this string to that, and how to hang the tassels — that self had not imagined how she would look in anything but the old drab workshirts and skirts and bonnets of earlier years.

Indecent, the old voice said. Amazing, the new voice said, with approval. Her body was old, wrinkled, sagging, splotched with the wear-marks of nearly eighty years… but hanging on it in weblike patterns were the brilliant colors and textures of her creation. When she shifted her weight from her sore hip, the whole mass swayed, as if she were the breeze. The big beads across the back rolled in the hollow of her back, comforting. The plant fibers she’d used across her shoulders scratched itches she always found it hard to reach.

She stood looking a long time, then carefully took the garment off. It would not be comfortable for many of the things she needed to do, but she liked the way it felt. She would wear it often, she knew In the meantime, she tied on the wrap she now wore most of the time, and made herself grin into the mirror. Rosara would not have approved of this, which left her legs bare, which had nothing underneath it but her raddled skin. Defiantly, thinking of Rosara, she stuck a finger in the pot of red paint she had used on the beads, and streaked it across her chest. Black paint: spots on her cheeks, on her forehead, on the sides of her thighs. Blue: a narrow line down her nose. She began to giggle; she had not imagined how much fun it could be to treat her body as the material of art. She made green handprints on her belly, on the front of her thighs, one each on buttocks. She splashed yellow on hands and feet. Then, leaving yellow footprints, she walked out into the street, unafraid, unthinking, for the first time. It was drizzling, a warm drizzle that hovered as much as fell. Ofelia walked up and down the street, touching the doors of the houses she passed, leaving handprints splotched yellow and green. Suddenly she wanted to mark them all; she ran back into the center, snatched up the pot of yellow paint, and strode from house to house, touching every door. By the time she was halfway through, it was more than a game; fear returned in a rush, demanding that she finish, insisting that something dire would come if she stopped for anything, if she were interrupted, if the paint ran out before the last door was marked with her sigil. Breathless, her legs aching, she ran from door to door, house to house, even the toolsheds, the storage sheds, the waste recycler, back to the center, every door in the center… The panic subsided. Thunder muttered outside, and the drizzle thickened to rain. She remembered other times of strange feelings before storms, forebodings, crazy feelings, wild actions. It was just the storm. When it was over, she would feel better.

Wind slapped harder rain against the center windows. Ofelia looked down at her decorated body, and laughed. What a mess. She couldn’t go to bed like this. The rain would wash off the paint. She went outside and let the warm rain flow over her, scrubbing at her spots and stripes with her yellow hands, until she stood in a rainbow puddle. How odd that the colors didn’t merge into one muddy mess… for a moment her mind caught on that oddity, as the colors avoided each other and made rings and blotches on the ground. Then a closer peal of thunder sent her dashing across to her own hand-marked door. Warm rain it might be, but she felt cold now.

Inside, she dried herself and began humming. Memories of childhood naughtiness tumbled through her mind. Mudpies, messes in the kitchen, the time she had used colored chalk to make her sisters foot look swollen and infected… they had both thought it was funny, but her mother had been first scared, then furious. Her cheeks felt hot even now, remembering the slapping she’d gotten for that. Silly, “silly, silly… she had been a silly child, and she was a silly old woman, but it had been fun. Painting herself had been fun, and she would do it again. Why not? If she was going to be killed by some strange animals, she might as well have what fun she could first.

After the storm, the cattle were unsettled. Ofelia squinted across the meadow to the river, trying to count the restless animals. Fourteen… no, thirteen, she had counted the red one with the black face twice… no, fourteen, because there was the rusty-black one with the white spot. And the bull. She couldn’t see the calves in the tall grass. The sun was out; she had put on a wide hat tied with a long narrow piece of pink, and a blue cape beaded with green and yellow in flower patterns. She didn’t like it that much now, but that meant she didn’t mind if it got dirty while she hunted for the cattle.

One of the cows shied and broke into a bouncing trot away from the river; two more followed, moving faster. Ofelia caught a glimpse of a calf’s head between the cows, then the rest of the little herd lunged away from the river, grunting. The bull swung around to confront whatever had spooked them. Ofelia could see nothing. Halfway to the buildings, the cattle slowed and milled uneasily. Ofelia walked past the calf pen, angling upriver where the dust wasn’t so bad. The cattle watched her now, ears wide; the bull moved away from the river to rejoin the herd. She counted again: black-faced red cow, solid red cow, rusty black, brindle with white spot, plain brindle, red-and-white, rusty black with white spot… fourteen cows, one bull, at least one calf. From a distance she heard others, probably the younger bulls, who ran in a clump together.

She really needed to know how many calves there were. She angled nearer the herd, not directly at it. A dark red calf, paired with the black-faced red cow. And there, another one, brindle with white legs, beside one of the brindle cows. The cows shook their heads; she kept her distance, trying to see between bodies and legs and wide ears. Was that another? Yes — a lighter red calf, tucked into the middle. Ofelia walked back to the village, keeping an eye on the cows to be sure none of them charged her. The black-faced red cow had a bad temper.

On the far side of the buildings, the sheep were grazing peacefully, the lambs scattered like bundles of wool, sunning themselves. Ofelia walked out among them, rubbing the hard little heads and noticing that none of them had disappeared in the past few days. In the forest, something screeched, the usual midday screech that she had learned to ignore. Even the sheep ignored it, hardly twitching their ears. One of the lambs woke, lifting its head. It looked around, shook its ears, and rolled over, then folded and unfolded its legs quickly and stood, emitting a faint bleat. One of the ewes looked up and replied; the lamb gamboled over to its mother and began nursing. Within a minute or two, the other lambs were up and nursing too. Back among the buildings, she noticed that the rain had not obliterated all her wild handprints on the doors. Some were still bright, unblurred; others had half-melted away, clearly dissolved by falling water. One looked smeared. Ofelia stared at it — how had that happened? How had something stroked across it, almost like another hand wiping it out…?

A gusty breeze billowed her cape out behind her, and she laughed at herself. She had been wild and crazy, dancing around; it had been wet. She had certainly done it herself, in her haste. She had slipped, and put out her own hand… slowly, she raised her hand to the smear. The right height, perhaps, if she’d slipped in the wet. If she’d caught herself there, it could have happened. She didn’t remember it, but she did remember slipping and sliding a lot as she hurried from house to house, desperate to mark all the doors. She felt cold anyway. She wanted the sun on her shoulders. She took off the blue cape, and folded it over her arm, untied the hat and held it in her hand. The sun’s heat eased her, calmed her. It was all right. The animals were all right, and she was safe, and she would take a long nap this afternoon. In fact — she looked around. She had long since slept in other beds than the one she thought of as “her own.” On a day like this, with the wind in this quarter, her own bedroom would be muggy and unpleasant. Two houses down, though, she knew of an east-side bedroom with two windows. Since she opened the houses only when she was in them, it would have stayed shady and cool in the morning. On this door, the yellow hand-print had dripped only a little. Ofelia pushed the door open and went inside, leaving it open behind her. Dim light came from the shuttered windows; she smelled a faint mustiness. She really should air the houses out more often, she thought. She opened the bedroom shutters and felt the mattress on the bed. Not damp at all; something else must have been damp. Possibly clothes left in a closet. She tried to remember whose house this had been, but she wasn’t sure. On this side of the settlement, some houses had been lost to the two big floods; people who survived the flood had insisted on moving to the higher side, and younger people moved into the rebuilt houses. Not that it mattered now. Ofelia lay down on the bed and stretched. While she liked the familiar hollows and humps of her own mattress, it was sometimes nice to sleep on a different one. Her hips felt a little too high, her shoulders a little too low, but she was tired enough to doze off anyway. When she woke, the light outside had a pearly quality; the sun must have gone down. She was aware that she had been dreaming, a vivid dream involving colors and music and movement, but it vanished so fast that she could not retrieve any of it. She stretched again, and stood up slowly. Again that musty smell; her nose wrinkled. Perhaps she should leave the lights on in this house, to dry it out. She closed the shutters, turned on the lights, and went out, shutting the door behind her. In the twilight, colors and shapes seemed to float, unrelated to daytime geometry. Ofelia blinked, shrugged, and walked back home. With such a good nap behind her, she would have the energy to work on her beading tonight. Or even the log… she felt a little guilty when she realized how long it had been since she added anything interesting to the log.

The current date surprised her again. Had it been that long since the other colonists had come… had died? Ofelia sat a long time, wondering what to write. She had been lonely; she had been frightened; she still didn’t want to think about what had happened.

They were not my people, she wrote finally. But I am sorry, sorrier because I did not want them to come.

And their families think they died alone; they do not know someone is here to grieve for them.

Then she scrolled through the calendar, making short notes when anything caught her notice. Her back ached; her hip had stiffened. She turned off the computer finally, and pushed herself up. How it hurt to move when she had been still too long! It seemed impossible that she could get older, feel older, but she was definitely stiffer than when Barto had left.

In the sewing room, she eyed her beadwork with distaste. If she sat down again, she would stiffen into place. But she wasn’t sleepy yet. She leaned on the table, pushing the beads around idly. When she was young, she had had a necklace of brilliant blue beads streaked with silver and copper. She had left them behind, for her sister, when she married Humberto. He had never liked that necklace; he had suspected it was a gift from Caitano. He had been right, though she never admitted it to him. She wished she knew how to make such a beautiful color. The fabricator had color settings, but its version of dark blue was a dull, muddy color, nothing like the color she remembered.

She touched the dried cornhusks; they rustled under her fingers. Twisted into fat, stiff ropes, cornhusks might be the edging she wanted for the new cloak. She could dye them — she stopped, her skin puckering suddenly with alarm. What…? Not a sound, though her ears strained to hear past the pounding of her own blood. Nothing to see when she turned slowly, eyeing everything around her. Nothing. Nothing, but — she was still alert, still certain of danger.

That smell. The same smell as at the other house. Musty, she had thought, and yet when she came to think about it, not the same as mildew. A thicker smell than mildew. Her heart hammered in her chest; when she put her fist to her side she was not surprised to feel the rapid throb on her chest wall. She had to swallow, though her mouth was suddenly dry.

“I am here,” she said to the darkness outside, the silence, the emptiness. Her voice sounded odd, scratchy like a bad broadcast. “Come out if you are there.” She had no idea who, or what, she was talking to. Ghosts of the slain? She did not believe in ghosts, exactly, although she had seen Humberto once, six months after he died. He had been wearing a white suit, and a blue hat; he had been smiling at another woman, and when she said his name, he vanished. But did ghosts smell? Humberto had not smelled, as a ghost; he had merely slid, an immaculate and dimensionless image, across her sight that one time. Ofelia held her breath a moment, then breathed in, not quite sniffing. Yes, whatever this was smelled, and smelled different. New. It was most likely an animal, something from the forest grown bold enough to venture into the town, though the forest creatures had never done so before. With what confidence she could muster, Ofelia walked out of the sewing room to the front door of the center. Light spilled out the doorway from behind her, and her shadow stretched away from her feet. She could see nothing but the light patches on either side of her shadow. Inside the door were the switches for the exterior lights, rarely used even when the colony had been there. Now she turned them on. Only two of the bulbs came on; the others must have been damaged by storms. But in that skewed light, she saw something move, down the street.

A monster. An animal. An alien.

A deadly alien, which had already killed humans.

Ofelia could not make herself walk out into the street, or back into the center. She could not even turn off the lights. She looked the other way. Something else moved there, a dark shape against darker night. It came closer, a massive bluntness, manylegged, eyes glowing in the light… Cows. Ofelia sagged against the doorframe as several cows strolled up the lane. Between them, a calf pranced. One of the cows, with a switch of her tail, slapped the handprint on a door. So that had been cows. And the smell — was that cow? Hard to tell, but the cows added a ripe, complex odor to the lane. “Cows,” Ofelia said aloud. The cows startled, ears wide, seeming almost to lean away from her voice. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to butcher the cows for scaring her so. “AAOOH!” she bellowed, without knowing it was coming, a bellow from her gut that hurt her throat coming out. The cows ducked, whirled, and galloped off, loud thunder of hooves in the lane. “Stupid cows!” Ofelia yelled after them. Full of righteous indignation, she flicked off the lights in the center, and stalked across to her own house. Now that she had spoken, she found she wanted to keep talking, to feel words in her throat again, to hear her voice in her outside ears, not just in her head. “Silly of me to be scared of cows. I should have known they came into the streets at night — there’s no gate, after all.” But even as she said it, she wondered… she had never found manure between the houses, and why would they come? If they foraged in the gardens regularly, she’d have found damage from that.

Her voice dried up suddenly, as if she had had only so many words to say, and now they were gone. The cows came into the town. The cows came in and the cows don’t come in and the cows came in because… because… because they wanted to because something scared them away from the river. It hurt to be so scared again the same night. Her ribs hurt from the beating of her heart, from the painful clench of her breath. She stood in the kitchen, unable to move in any direction, until a cramp in her foot stabbed her with such pain that mere terror was forgotten. She leaned her weight onto the cramping foot, and her breath sobbed in and out, and finally the cramp eased. She was tired and she hurt all over. If the aliens wanted to kill her, they could do it while she was asleep.

Her foot cramped again once she was in bed, and she rolled out clumsily to stand on it again. She was too old for this. Familiar anger warmed her. She was too old, her foot hurt too much, things were too hard and it wasn’t her fault. When the cramp eased, she got back into bed and pulled the bedclothes over her. Then she remembered she hadn’t barred the door to the lane. She never did, but now… if there were aliens… Sighing, muttering a curse she was surprised to remember, she got up again and went out to bar the useless door.

She had to peek out. In the darkness, she heard the distant sound of cattle grazing, the rhythmic ripping of grass. A light breeze moved between the houses and stroked her body. She could see nothing, nothing at all, but the sparkles that she knew were inside her eyes. She stood until she shivered, then shut the door, barred it carefully, and went back to the bed. On the way, she stubbed her toe on something left out of place — she was not about to turn on the light again tonight — and she came to the bed in the mood to dare bad dreams.

Instead, she had good dreams. She could not remember them, but she did remember that they were good.

She had slept late; sunlight striped the kitchen floor from the garden door. She scowled. Garden door?

Had she blundered around in the dark barring the front door and forgotten the kitchen door to the garden?

Surely it had been shut all along.

She couldn’t remember. This had happened before, her thinking she had shut something that was open later, or opened something that was shut later. And it wasn’t new; it had started even before Barto left. She hated not remembering; it made her feel foolish. She got up and looked for the toe-stubbing object of the night before. That, at least, she would put out of the way, while she remembered it. She couldn’t find anything between the front door (still barred: she hadn’t botched that) and the bedroom door that could have given her toe that nasty clonk. The chairs were neatly pushed under the kitchen table. Nothing… unless she’d lost her way entirely, in the dark, and had stubbed her toe on the doorframe to her old bedroom. And if that had happened, surely her hands would have felt the wall. She looked from the open kitchen door to the bedroom door, from window to window, back to the chairs and the table. Nothing was out of place. In the bright morning sunlight, with the rich growing smells of her garden coming in on the breeze, she could not believe that anything had been really wrong in the night. She sniffed. No strange smells, though the scent of cow was strong. When she opened the door to the lane, she saw cowflops dotting the lane like stepping stones.

She fetched the garden cart and the light shovel, and spent the morning picking up cow manure for the compost trench. The cows were back in the meadow, grazing peacefully as if nothing had ever bothered them. It was much easier to get the manure off the lanes than out of the grass; she told herself that if the cows would only come into town every night, she could manure every garden plot every season and keep the waste recycler topped up. Of course, she didn’t want to spend every day picking up manure; she didn’t like the smell of it. When the trench was full, she put the rest of the manure into the waste recycler, then showered to get the smell off. At the center, she noted in the log that the cows had come into the streets at night. It probably meant nothing, but it was a change. When she checked the weather display, she saw one of the big sea-storms — the first of the year — far out in the ocean. That was more dangerous than any imagined aliens. She jotted down a list of chores to finish before the storm could arrive — if it did. Repairing shutters, doors, making sure nothing was loose to blow free in the winds. She might spend the storm in the center this time, she thought. She could move a mattress into one of the sewing rooms. The one from her old bedroom would do, and it was nearby.

It was also too heavy to carry by herself, and the lane was damp, smudged with the remains of the cowflops. Ofelia glared at the stains. She was not about to drag her bed through cow manure and then sleep on it, even days later. And the garden cart still smelled of manure, too. In the waste recycler’s storerooms were larger, heavier carts once used for hauling; Ofelia fetched one of those. It wouldn’t fit through the front door. She dragged the mattress to the door, wrestled it onto the cart, and then pulled the cart to the center. The centers door was wider; the cart just fit through it… but not through the inside door to the sewing room. Ofelia dragged her mattress off the cart and left it where it was. She was too tired now to drag it into the sewing room.

By the time she got the cart back to the waste recycler storage, it was twilight, and she felt grumpy and illused. Stupid storm, stupid cows, stupid mattress, stupid cart. Stupidest of all, the people who built doorways too narrow for carts to get through them. And stupid Ofelia, because she had not checked the garden today, and the slimerods had probably cut through half the tomato plants. She went outside in a rush, and found no damage, but a crushed slimerod core between the tomatoes. A fresh one, still glistening. She picked all the ripe tomatoes she could find in the gathering darkness, and took them inside. She was not going to think about that slimerod. Perhaps a cow had stepped on it. Perhaps a sheep. Perhaps a murderous alien planning to cut off her head… but at the moment, she was not going to worry about it.

She took a shower, and the streaming water soothed her irritation as well as her muscles. When she came out, and toweled herself dry, she felt like putting on some of her beads. White ones, red ones, brown ones. Then she remembered that she had not made dough that day; she would have to start supper from scratch. She dipped a handful of flour, a finger of shortening, a dash of salt, a little water. Beneath her hands, the dough formed into a plump, firm ball, from which she pinched smaller lumps. She reached out one hand to the stove and set the griddle to heat. Then she rolled the little lumps into flat rounds with her secondbest rolling pin (Rosara had taken the best rolling pin, and she still resented that, though Rosara was probably still in cryo, on her way to someplace she wouldn’t like — worse punishment than Ofelia would have given anyone.)

She crumbled sausage into a pan, chopped onion, and started them frying. She would not have pork sausage much longer; she had finally eaten her way through nearly all the pork in the freezers at the center. Eventually, she would have to butcher a cow or sheep.

She should do that while she was still strong enough, she told herself. She had told herself that last winter,

too, and then she had gone on eating the frozen meat on the grounds that it might spoil and that would be

a waste. The truth was that she liked pork sausage. If only the pigs had not disappeared… the colonists

had finally butchered the remainder when it became obvious that the pigs, unlike the sheep and cattle, would not stay in the terraformed area near the settlement.

When the sausage and onion were half done, Ofelia flicked the rounds of dough onto the hot griddle, and flipped them with a twig, then onto her plate. Another minute or two for sausage and onions; she sliced the fresh tomatoes as she let the meat sizzle, and added sprigs of mint and basil. She had never grown tired of good food. Some old people did; she could remember them complaining about the lack of flavor, or simply not eating, but she was luckier than that. A bite of warm tomato, then of hot sausage and onion in flatbread, a nip of mint… yes. And tomorrow, she would finish planning for the storm, if it came. She would go back to her regular checks of the machines; it had been several days since she inspected the pumps. She would make sure everything was ready for the storm. She would even wrestle that be-damned mattress into the sewing room.